3 Tips for Writing School Essays in Open Office

Whether you're in college or high school, you may need to write a lot of essays and you might not have the money for Microsoft Word. No matter-Open Office, an open source alternative from OpenOffice.org, is a great way to write papers for school or work without shelling out your hard-earned bucks. It can do just about everything that Microsoft Word can do and even has a few extra tricks up its sleeve.

Here are a few tips for writing school essays in Open Office quickly and easily.

Check your document type. If you're going to be sending your essay in to a professor or teacher, make sure that it's not saved as an ODT, which is the default in Open Office. The program is capable of saving files in a Microsoft Word-friendly format, which is what most classrooms will want. It sounds like a simple mistake, but it's easy to accidentally start saving your files as ODTs and lose points from a school essay assignment.

If you save from an ODT to a Word document, check to make sure that all of your formatting's still there. You might lose some spacing if you're not careful.

Get a live word count. One of my favorite features of Microsoft Office was the little live word count on the bottom right hand side of the screen. When I switched to Open Office, I was disappointed to find that I'd always have to click Tools and Word Count to see the word count displayed.

But Open Office is open source, and that means that if you look hard enough, you'll find a solution from some selflessly dedicated programmer out there. Some guy (or gal) with the screen name Yawaramin made an easy-to-install Python script that not only gives you a live word count, but allows you to see what percentage of your school essay is done if you put in a goal word count. For instance, my goal word count for this article is 500, and I'm currently at about 50%.

You can visit this link for more info: Yawaramin's word count. It's very easy to use, free, and installing it only takes a few seconds. It's an essential tool for anyone who writes a lot of school essays in Open Office.

Protect your school essays in Open Office. While Open Office is great, it's free, and it's got some bugs. You don't want one of those bugs to permanently destroy your school essay, so here's a quick tip to help you avoid that fate.

Click the Tools menu and scroll down to Options. In Options, click the "Load/Save" menu and select General.

One of the options in this menu is the autorecovery, which brings your document back if Open Office crashes. It'll say "Save Autorecovery information every 15 minutes," or however long it's currently set to. Change this to one minute and you'll be better protected from Open Office bugs that could wipe out your school essay. Remember to save frequently and back up your document as you work on it.

Have any other tips or questions about writing school essays in Open Office? Post them below.